Communication between nodes in a distributed system can be performed in a number of ways. For example, an application or other process can send commands and/or data to another host on an Internet Protocol (IP) or other network using a communication protocol such as the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). However, the efficiency with which a sending application makes use of the hardware and other capabilities of the intervening communication network may vary greatly depending on how the sending and receiving nodes are configured and in particular how they implement and use the selected communication protocol. For example, at one extreme a sending node may send too many packets to the receiver, even when the receiver queues are full, and may continue to resend packets that are dropped due to receiver queue overflow, until a packet is acknowledged as having been received. If a more conservative approach is used to send packets, the receiver may not become overwhelmed, but on the other hand performance may be affected by the slow rate of communication, and the available bandwidth (hardware capacity) may not be utilized fully.